Missing currency symbol: CHF

John H wrote:
With "Leopard" at the end of the month, maybe that will address the problem.

Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe Leopard will introduce a whole bunch of new formatting issues with Swiss number formats, just like every Mac OS since v7.0. I mean, why break with a nice tradition? (bitter sarcasm)
Whatever, after carefully reading the whole list of those 300+ new "features" in Leopard ( http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/300.html ) I'm pretty sure that 10.5 will be the first OS X upgrade that I'll happily ignore. At least as long as there's no need to buy a new (Intel) Mac that can't run Classic anyway... (Oh, wait, actually there's one feature I will probably miss: "Full Unicode Support for AppleScript"! Oh well, one just can't have it all...)

hanks Tom

OK, Apple didn't invent the used list of currencies

but they prove that they are unable to use the list(s) a consistent way.

We exchanged about this question in the thread:

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=6610202

Here is just an excerpt:

+At this time, in this area, the more funny I met it for Turkish currency.+

+The operating system uses YTL+
+Numbers says TRY but with this symbol it see a string+
+and, at last, to get a working currency they must use TL.+

So my thoughts are:

a - if they want to use ICUS lists, at least we may hope that they use them a bit more seriously.

b - as iWork is localized for less countries that Mac OS is, it would be fine to drop the old "ICUS" lists and apply the international list defined as ISO 4217.
It would be easier for everybody:

• a single list to install ask less efforts than several localized ones
• users employing Apple products would get correct currencies symbols worldwide.

Do you know where this (these) list(s) is (are) stored in the system?
I searched several times but didn't find them.

Yvan KOENIG (from FRANCE mardi 25 mars 2008 18:33:48)

Hello

Are you sure that Numbers displays SwF ?
On my french version, it uses sFr. which is wrong too.
The Operating system uses sFr (with no trailing period)

Use the "Numbers > Send a comment" item to pass the info to the Numbers team.

Yvan KOENIG (from FRANCE mercredi 5 septembre 2007 11:44:47)

Tom Gewecke wrote:

on my french version, it uses sFr.

Interesting. In my machine, set to English, both Numbers and the OS (system prefs/international/formats) use SwF.

Mine too

Hello

It appears that Apple guys built shortcuts fom the "localized currency name".

SWiss Franc --SwF

Franc Suisse -->sFr. (the period is surprising, it is missing in the currency used by the operating system).

I already posted to Apple telling them that the currency writing is not a game for translators, it is a serious feature ruled by
ISO 4217.

I assumes that the Numbers' team didn't know this document.

If someone knows in which Numbers file these odd strings are stored, I am interested by the info.

Yvan KOENIG (from FRANCE mercredi 5 septembre 2007 22:24:26)

Just recently I've noticed that the currency symbol for Swiss Franc has "magically" changed to "SFr." on my Swiss German system, too, and there's no way to bring it away.

To explain what I mean: In all Mac OS versions that I have used from System 7.0.1 up to Panther the currency symbol was always freely editable in the International Preferences/Control Panel under "Numbers". That ability has gone for good on Tiger (and one can only wonder what the responsible Apple developers have been smoking). However, on my PowerBook - which shipped with OS 10.3.7 - some settings I made in Panther still seemed to stick after the Tiger upgrade just until recently. I guess they broke either with the 10.4.9 or 10.4.10 update.

Yesterday I've dived deep into the system and unix files to find any list of the currency symbols in order to change it the "hard way". Nothing. No plist file, no string file. It looks like it's been hard-coded somewhere. If someone can point me in the right direction, I'd be really glad about that.

As a side note: the Swiss number, date, time or currency formats were ALWAYS buggy all the way back to System 7 (and perhaps earlier)! On every system upgrade one bug might have been fixed yet a new one would pop up for sure...

May you give the swiss rules for numbers, dates and time?
For currency I'm aware of the ISO rule: CHF.

I will be able to pass them to Apple asking them to take care of true rules, not reinventing them without care.

I assumes that it would be too complex to add some preferences adjusting the apps behaviour.
So my basic idea is that it woul dbe usefull to add two localised versions:

-- an alternate english one using the comma as decimal separator for users whose own language is not used by iWork's applications

-- an alternate french one using the period as decimal separator for users working with this variant of french.

Yvan KOENIG (from FRANCE lundi 24 septembre 2007 18:24:29)

KOENIG Yvan wrote:
May you give the swiss rules for numbers, dates and time?
For currency I'm aware of the ISO rule: CHF.

Currency: While "SFr" is also correct, in Switzerland we actually use "Fr. " or "Fr " (incl. the space). The ISO code is "CHF". I guess that anything else is wrong. ("SwF"??? - W.T.F.! 😉 )

Numbers: 1'234.56
... where the apostrophe as the thousands separator was known to mess up a lot of things on pre-OS X systems. That has been fixed in OS X but new bugs arised. Usually with the Time formats...

Time: actually same as German: "18:32:56 Uhr"
But I for one definitely don't see the point of having the suffix " Uhr" which simply translates "o'clock". I always remove it from the default time format. But there was a bug up to Panther which didn't remove the " Uhr" suffix in Carbon apps, no matter what you did. Which was leading to follow-up GUI bugs in those apps. Even the Time Format preference pane had troubles related to the suffix. That has been fixed in Tiger.

A new Time format bug arised in Tiger though: if you don't apply a leading zero to the time formats, under certain circumstances the leading zero for seconds will be missing (e.g. when you print something, if I remember correctly).

Date: same as German - "Montag, 24. September 2007"
This seems to work surprisingly well...

---

I have searched the web to find some solutions and here's what I've found:
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20050926170928881
and
http://www.macfreek.nl/mindmaster/DecimalSeperator_in_Mac_OSX

The macosxhints.com hint regarding the PrefPane from Panther (luckily I still have a Panther volume on an old G4!) fixed the currency symbol problem for some apps like AppleWorks, but not for Numbers, however. I don't know if it will help to reboot while cleaning some system caches, I didn't have the time to do so today. I'm still experimenting with it. I found that it's not necessary to replace the IntlFormats.prefPane inside the Localization.prefPane package. Instead I double-clicked the IntlFormats.prefPane to install in my user account and used it's GUI to apply the currency format. Note that if you then switch to the Tiger pref pane it may freeze. So enable the Panther one only temporarily and delete at least SystemPreferences caches afterwards.
That's what I can say about it so far...

The other hint seems to do basically the same, but the Unix way.

Update to my previous post:
After studying macfreek.nl's hint, messing around with various settings, figuring out how to escape non-printing Unicode characters, executing obscure Terminal commands, re-editing plist files (Pref Setter rules!) etc. etc., this is what I've found out:

• There was no way to change the default currency symbol in Numbers.app 1.0 from "SFr." to "Fr ", no matter what I did. I even searched inside the Numbers.app package, found nothing. (I didn't install Numbers.app 1.0.1 yet.)

---

The other things are actually slightly off-topic, i.e. not related to Numbers.app:

• Following the hints mentioned above it should be possible to change the currency symbol to "Fr " (or whatever) in most other applications. Just avoid to change your setting in the International PrefPane back to the default Swiss format.

• The cause of the "Leading zero for seconds missing" bug lies somewhere else than I thought, although I haven't found the exact cause. I have found a way how to avoid it, though: After you have set your time format in the International PrefPane to the default "Schweiz" format and you'd like to get rid of the ubiquitous and superfluous " Uhr" suffix, click on the button to adjust the time format, remove the "vorm." and "nachm." suffixes and don't change anything else in there.
To check if your Mac suffers the leading zero bug, launch Script Editor and paste the following code:
+tell current application+
repeat
+get current date+
+delay 1+
+end repeat+
+end tell+
Enable the Event Log and let the script run for a while, it will print the current time in the Event Log window every second. If the time you get is like "14:01:05", all is fine. If you get "14:01:5", there's the bug.

• Actually there was a bug in Swiss German Date formats, too, I just don't remember how to reproduce it anymore (I noticed it last year). All I recall is, that carbon apps weren't able to show a short date format like "29.9.07", they would always show the full year like "29.9.2007". I'm not sure what I've changed since then.

• When you set your Date format to Swiss German, for example FileMaker 9 reads the system date format as "29/09/2007" instead of "29.09.2007". Doesn't happen if you use the German German date/time/number formats.

---

I have written an AppleScript for my personal use to run a couple of "defaults write" Terminal commands to set quickly some of my favorite International number/time/currency formats in case they'd get lost again. I just need to tweak the script a bit more so it will give the average user more choices of what (s)he needs to change - since I don't expect everyone to like my personal Swiss formats... 🙂
When it's ready for the public, it will be available at http://www.loukash.com/en/download/sub06.html and at macupdate.com

Hello

I apologize: I forgot that I asked for that 😉

After reading your two posts, I think that the best thing to do would be to pass it as it to Apple.
I just which to emphasize upon the ISO CHF.

About strings used by Numbers, I discovered too that Numbers is not always using the system's settings.
Just a sample:
When I enter a date, it defaults to 2 oct. 07 when my system's settings ALWAYS use a four digits year (I didn't forget year 2000).

In some messages I made an error. I wrote than my system uses "sFr" as swiss currency. In fact, it uses "sFr." the period is here as it is in Numbers. So I guess that the currency list is available somewhere in a system file.

Yvan KOENIG (from FRANCE mardi 2 octobre 2007 17:04:14)

Just want to reinforce the need for Apple to deal with this issue. I am working in Geneva where there are numerous Apple users, many from the English-speaking anglophone international community who, like me, are probably using the International version of OS X and iWorks 08. We absolutely need to have the Numbers currency issue addressed.

Swiss Francs should offer the CHF designation as per the ISO rules. Amazing that this option is not there.